to audiences here-that from this archaic arrange- ment can spring an enduring love. The groom is fly- ing in from Houston, Texas; another relative travels from Australia, and you brace yourself for the cul- tural collisions. The result is a comedy, but only just. India's stressful poise between orthodoxy and inno- vation (listen for the clash of peacock and cell phone) leads to a devastating family fracture that is only half-healed by the celebrations at the end. In English and Hindi, sometimes within a single con- versation.-A.L. (2/18 & 25/02) (BAM Rose Cine- mas, Paris, and Sunshine Cinema.) QUEEN OF THE DAMNED The late, great R. & B. singer Aaliyah makes her ap- pearance about halfway through this bloodless vam- pire chronicle based on Anne Rice's wacky novel. Stuart Townsend plays Lestat, the night stalker who awakens the Queen from her slumber with garish rock tunes. The whole film is a swishy, rococo howl-too humorless to be camp (although most of the cast puts on a hysterical Transylvanian accent) and dull beyond reason.-B.D. (East 86th Street Cinemas, Empire 25, Kips Bay Theatre, Lincoln Square, and Union Square.) SCRATCH It started SImply enough: in 1975, Theodore Liv- ingston (a.k.a. GrandWizzard Theodore) was playing music in his Bronx River Houses apartment when his mom yelled at him to turn it down; he grabbed the record with his hand and heard a scratchy noise that sounded kind of cool. Starting from this mythic zero hour, Doug Pray's enthusiastic homage to d.j.s fol- lows the evolution of scratching from an accident to an art form. In its current state, scratching requires an absurd dexterity and a love for mind-melting sonic distortions. One practitioner, Mix Master Mike, tells of a night when he was so freaked out by the sounds emanating from his turntables that he believed he was communicating with intergalactic beings. His story, along with those of other influential turntab- lists, makes for a rough-sketch history of a style that's now being co-opted by footwear and soft-drink ads.-Michael Agger (Sunshine Cinema.) ',:;; , ''\. . u \"-,' \ \-\ " . J - "- \\ J .:4 (.",.., of familiar terrain. In its sharp-etched way, this is no less comic than Moretti's other work, and, for all its sophistication, the comedy is of the primitive kind- that of continuing to live (to jog, to cook, to go to school) when the reason to live has fallen from your hands. In Italian.-A.L. (2/4/02) (Lincoln Plaza Cin- emas and Village East Cinemas.) STORYTELLING Another disturbance of the peace from the writer- director Todd Solondz who made "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness." This time, we get a movie split in half, the first part of which concerns a creative-writing student (Selma Blair), thin and white, who dumps her disabled boyfriend and, for good measure, sleeps with her black professor. In the sec- ond half, we trace the exploits of a documentary t ---- .... "- , ...... " ! \ . """" J II! I II f J I '( ' .... \ ì \.../ I' 1/ MilIa Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez in "Resident Evil" THE SON'S ROOM The Italian director Nanni Moretti has delved into his darkest material to date and come up with his best film; even here, amazing to report, his custom- ary lightness of touch has not deserted him. Moretti himself stars as a psychiatrist, Giovanni, who is mar- ried to the calm and adoring Paola (Laura Morante). They have two children Uasmlne Trinca and Giu- seppe Sanfelice), one of whom dies, taking with him the dream of a happy family. Moretti's pacing is hard to fault, as he follows the hairline cracks that widen into gulfs and leave the household looking iso- lated and loveless. As a case study, the movie adds lit- tle to the archives of grief, and rightly so; Moretti is simply drawing up his own distinctively colored map 42 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 18, 2002 filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) who wants to unearth what the youth of today are doing with themselves in high school. The answer is, more or less, nothing, al- though we do come across one slacker who would like to be on TV. In short, Solondz presents two tales meant to winkle out the cultural encounters that em- barrass us the most, and then twists the knife and leaves us squirming harder than before, It's clever enough, and you could gash yourself on some of the lines, but, when a director is as resolutely ungenerous as Solondz, the end can only come as a relief.-A.L. (2/4/02) (Angelika Film Center.) SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS For several years, Tony Curtis had been a virtual guarantor of box-office success, and the New York locations for this 1957 film were invaded bv thou- sands of teen-agers, who broke through pol{ce bar- ricades to get to their idol. But these throngs ignored the completed picture, in which Curtis grew up into an actor and gave what will probably be remem- bered as the best performance of his career. Even the presence of that other box-office guarantor, Burt Lancaster, did not lift the picture from the red ink. This is understandable, because the movie is a slice of perversity-a study of dollar and power worship, with Lancaster as a Broadway gossip columnist and Curtis as an ingratiating, blackmailing press agent. Clifford Odets never came through more pungently as a screenwriter; his distinctively idiomatic dia- logue generally seems like bad poetry when it's spo- ken from the screen, but here it's harshly expressive - <Ii> \ t r '\, \ ....... , (""-.., "'- I It" t , ,,-...... t II, " \" If, l't" \ I ',' ,\\ \ \ \ ' \ "'/ \ ,\, ...... I I I' , 'I I I L and taut. The director, Alexander Mackendrick, has a crisp film-noir style: the production is shaped by a zest for the corrupt milieu, the pulsating big-city life (what used to be called "the symphony of a city")- the streets, the night clubs, the cynical types, the noise and desperation.-Pauline Kael (Film Forum; March 15-19.) THE TIME MACHINE In the future, we'll all be listening to Enya. The dys- peptic novel by H. G. Wells about a Victorian in- ventor who dabbles in time travel gets a New Age makeover courtesy of his great -grandson, the direc- tor Simon Wells. As Alexander Hartdegen, Guy Pearce does an admirable job of keeping a straight face, and his rides in the time machine are astonish- ing special effects displays. One set piece-a triple- time morphing of nineteenth-century Manhattan into our skyscraper era--could be shown at the Hay- den Planetarium. Even the improbable leaps of logic and the bland, international English dialogue don't really dampen the fun. It's when Pearce arrives in the future and discovers the Eloi (sort of like the Ana- sazi, except they're really into bamboo) that the race and class issues get an awkward cringe-inducing treatment. Still, it's worth sticking around just to see Jeremy Irons as the Uber-Morlock.-M.A. (Cinema 3, 84th Street Sixplex, Empire 25, Kips Bay Theatre, 19th Street East 6, Olympia I and II, Orpheum VII, 34th Street Theatre, and Village Theatre VII.) WE WERE SOLDIERS A bloody piece of hero worship devoted to an ideal commander-Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore (Mel Gibson)-and to fighting and dying in the right way. The training is bruising, the leadership inspired, the wives as supportive as deeply rooted oaks. In 1965.. early in the war in Vietnam, Moore leads units of the Army's Seventh Cavalry against a much larger North Vietnamese force. Mel Gibson is leathery but quick and alert, his eyes darting this way and that. -< When he runs around from one part of the perimeter 5 to another, his M -16 blazing, the movie is exciting in a rudimentary, gung-ho way. The writer-director Randall Wallace stages much of the combat at very close range, with masses of North Vietnamese in- 2